I’ve mentioned the new drops of WMB in passing during the year, and I’ve spoken about them in detail as I’ve visited customers and conferences during 2010. So far though, I don’t think I’ve written about it at length this year. Considering I’ve written developerWorks articles and Redbooks on the subject in the past, it’s something of an omission that I need to fix! The version 7 release has had four overarching themes: Universal Connectivity for SOA; Dynamic Operational Management; Platforms, Environments, and Performance; and (perhaps most importantly) Simplicity and Productivity.

I said I was excited, and that’s for two reasons, I think. Firstly, as a technical integration developer, I’m constantly interested in the new functi﻿on being introduced to enhance the capabilities of the product – I’ll list out a few of those in a moment, but the number of new nodes and functions that have been added to enable you as a developer to get at your information, connect to your services and endpoints, and transform your messages, is just fantastic. Secondly, under that theme of Simplicity and Productivity, the product has been hugely streamlined, and with the usability enhancements and patterns support that have been added, it is faster than ever to get going even as the function becomes richer.

I’m excited about this, as I know it can help to maintain consistency, learn good practices, and speed along development – isn’t it much easier to build something when you have a framework to follow? I know one of the first things I tend to do when learning something is to look for a good example, and then as a good citizen I like to share what I’ve done to help others, when I can. If you’re a Broker developer I hope you’ll be keen to share and learn within that community. I know Ant and the rest of the team will be eager to listen to your feedback, as they have been doing actively for the past couple of years. There is a nice introductory article on how to create your own patterns on developerWorks. Get contributing!

By the way, I love this paragraph from Ant’s post announcing the community, as it echoes and reinforces what I’ve been talking about in my role as WebSphere Messaging Community Lead. I’m sure he won’t mind me borrowing it:

With this in mind you might be interested in a new global pattern community – mqseries.net has added a pattern community where you can find, download and share patterns. We will be putting some very cool example patterns up over the next few weeks to help get it started. Why mqseries.net? Well communities are all about people, and mqseries.net is where the Broker community go to find answers.

Hypervisor Edition

The final thing I want to mention is that WebSphere Message Broker can now be deployed into a virtualised environment from the WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance. This is cool, particularly when you start to see some of the tie-ins with things like patterns and scripting which enable you to customise the broker instances. A video is worth at least another three paragraphs of waffle though, so I’ll hand over to my colleagues…

I don’t have time to post an in-depth update on the latest announcements from IBM Hursley today but will hopefully have a chance to dig deeper on some of these later in the week. My colleagues in Development have been working hard on new and updated software offerings in the WebSphere Connectivity space, and today was “the big reveal” of a slew of them. For now, here are the links to the announcements… I’ll try to fill in more detail on some of the areas in which I’ve been particularly interested, soon.

WebSphere MQ Advanced Message Security (AMS) version 7.0.1, also available for z/OS of course! This is a new product providing significant enhancements to MQ’s security story by encrypting data at rest with no need to re-code your applications. This is one I’ll definitely be coming back to in a future post… it’s very cool indeed, particularly since it’s non-invasive and transparent to the user.

WebSphere MQ File Transfer Edition V7.0.3 adds some nice web and REST features, as well as ad-hoc transfers and sweeter integration with WebSphere Message Broker (which itself gained new FTE nodes recently). There’s a fantastic story developing around enterprise managed file transfer interoperating with an ESB, here. Oh yes, and this version also works with AMS if you need to thoroughly encrypt your FTE data, both on disk as well as the existing wire capabilities using SSL channels.

WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus Registry Edition V7.0 puts the SOA registry at the heart of the ESB (which is quite honestly where it belongs!). There have been great improvements in WSRR and WebSphere ESB lately, and again I should come back to point some of these out soon.

Phew. Busy developers. If you follow me online you’ll know I’m a techie so it should come as little surprise that I’m excited, and dare I say it, “pumped”, about some of these updates. Looking forward to playing with them in more detail.

WebSphere Service Registry and Repository is a system for storing, accessing and managing information, commonly referred as service metadata, used in the selection, invocation, management, governance and reuse of services in a successful SOA. In other words, it is where you store information about services in your systems, or in other organizations’ systems, that you already use, plan to use, or want to be aware of.

The Registry and Repository is becoming increasingly central to many SOA deployments and is strongly integrated with several of IBM’s runtimes (including hooks with my long-term product specialisms, WebSphere MQ and Message Broker).

Over the past few months I’ve gotten to know many of the IBMers who worked on these books and papers personally, and I have to say that they are the absolute experts on the topics. I know I’ll be reaching for these publications when I need to know my way around specific topic areas.

Photos I’m taking at IMPACT 2009 are up on Flickr – this slideshow should auto-update as more are added, since it selects from the tagged images in my account. I’m taking snapshots using my compact Canon camera (often without flash to avoid distracting the presenters) and uploading via Eye-Fi so the results are varied 🙂

I’ve been heading to Vegas on a regular basis for the past few years, but it has always been for internal events rather than customer ones. In my role, I’ve always been excited by technology and the innovation we get up to internally – but much, much more importantly, I need to be talking to customers and partners to understand how that technology and innovation is being used in the real world. I’m very much looking forward to talking to WebSphere and other IBM customers about their experiences with our products, what they are looking for from Service Oriented Architectures, and taking those messages back into our labs.